Helium 10 Buzz 11/28/24: Amazon Dynamic Traffic Engine | Temu vs Shein Intensifies
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Amazon Japan under increased scrutiny, Timu and Shien revolutionizing Black Friday marketing with aggressive keyword bidding, and the first ever live selling analytics platform in the TikTok shop app store. This and more on this week's episode of the Weekly Buzz. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. ♪

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our Helium 10 weekly buzz, where we give you a rundown of all the new stories that are going on in the Amazon, Walmart, and e-commerce world. We highlight the latest new feature alerts from Helium 10, and we review a training tip of the week that'll give you serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world.

Today, our host is going to be Shevali Patel. And so, Shevali, take it away and let us know what's buzzing.

The first article we're covering today is a spicy news piece from Reuters. On November 26th, Japan's Fair Trade Commission conducted an on-site inspection of Amazon Japan on suspicion of anti-monopoly law violations. The investigation stems from allegations that Amazon Japan pressured sellers to lower their prices in exchange for favorable placement on its platform. A government source disclosed that these practices might constitute irrational demands on sellers.

But this isn't the first time that Amazon Japan has faced scrutiny. In 2018, in fact, it was investigated for allegedly forcing suppliers to absorb costs related to discount promotions.

While Amazon Japan has not addressed these current concerns, they did address those concerns back then. So hopefully in a bit of time, that's going to change as well for this concern. Now, Reuters has also reported last week that Amazon is likely to face a EU investigation next year on allegedly prioritizing its private label products over third-party sellers.

I don't sell in the Japanese marketplace, but I would love to hear from you guys. What has been your experience? And if this is the first time that you're hearing about it, maybe this is one of those things that you'll want to keep a pulse on just to be safe and to see what sort of changes this brings about in the marketplace practices over there. As this investigation does signal a potential tightening of regulations around e-commerce platforms. Cases like this are

are really what end up leading to changes in platform policies, pricing strategies, or seller agreements, right? So if you don't sell in Japan, alternatively, this with simultaneous investigations in Japan and Europe, regardless of if you're a seller or agency, you should expect similar regulatory measures in other markets, noting that adapting to these sort of changes proactively could protect long-term business growth. Okay.

Next up, we have some more chatter on Rufus from Amazon. So I've talked about Rufus quite a bit before on the weekly buzz, but I'm covering it again this time of year simply because I do believe that this generative AI powered shopping assistant is about to be super powerful for millions of shoppers. Designed to simplify shopping in general, Rufus is likely to assist with tailored gift suggestions, product comparisons, party hosting help,

and even help with crafting ideas and cooking advice. Okay, so for example, customers can ask Rufus things like gifts for STEM loving seven-year-olds or practical tips such as comparing holiday decor options.

The AI also tracks orders to help customers stay informed about their deliveries during the bustling holiday season. So in addition, Amazon's new AI shopping guides and Amazon Lens enhances that shopping experience, helping summarize product details to assist in decision-making.

while Amazon Lens allows users to find products by scanning images or barcodes. This is why, if you're a seller, I want to urge you to understand how these tools can direct traffic to your listings and optimize for AI queries. Rufus's ability to provide tailored suggestions means you really ought to need to focus on creating detailed, optimized, descriptive product listings to increase your chances of being recommended.

especially aligning your listing with seasonal specific prompts such as hosting, gifts, and crafting to capitalize on holiday trends by using relevant keywords and high quality images to make products more likely to appear in Rufus recommendations, ensuring that your product information aligns with common decision-making factors summarized in those guides and that your images fit those holiday themes as well. All right.

Switching gears, what else do we have? Multiple sites like Finimize are reporting fast-growing e-commerce platforms, Timu and Shein, as revolutionizing Black Friday marketing by bidding fiercely on competitor search keywords like Walmart Black Friday deals.

and Zara Jeans. This strategy has driven up cost per click prices, forcing traditional retailers to reconsider their advertising budgets. The increased costs are cutting into marketing ROI, prompting many businesses to shift their focus to platforms like Facebook and TikTok.

or even traditional advertising channels to attract loyal high margin customers rather than bargain shoppers. This approach signals a broader trend in retail marketing, prioritizing long-term customer loyalty over those short-term sales spikes. And if you're a seller, here are three reasons why this could be relevant to you. One, rising CPC costs. With Timu and Shieh in increasing competition for high value keywords, you might see higher ad costs.

So re-evaluate your ad budgets and keyword strategies to maintain profitability. We actually post strategies every single week on YouTube, and I recommend going in and watching some of those to make sure that you are finding places of opportunity to tee up. I also think that this showcases the importance of a pivot towards social platforms like TikTok and Facebook. And

and finding those alternative cost-effective ways to reach your audience and build brand loyalty that you can then later retain by providing exceptional value and service. Regarding the same platforms, where is that Kermit drinking tea meme when you need it? The fashion law reports the legal fight between ultra-fast fashion giants Shein and Timu has intensified as Shein urges a federal court to reject Timu's motion to dismiss its lawsuit.

Sheehan's accused Timu of engaging in unfair competition through trade secret misappropriation, false advertising, trademark dilution, libel, etc. The lawsuit filed in August alleges that Timu unlawfully used Sheehan's trademarks and confidential business information directing influencers to disparage Sheehan's products and infringe on copyrights.

Timu, on the other hand, claims that Shein is leveraging the lawsuit to stifle competition and disrupt its operations in the U.S. Timu's parent company, PDD Holdings, down here, has filed to dismiss the motion, arguing jurisdictional issues and alleging that Shein has acted as a bad actor by issuing unwarranted takedown notices and interfering with merchant relationships.

relationships. I think this legal dispute highlights the cutthroat competition in the e-commerce space where fast growing platforms like Shein and Timu pose significant challenges to establish players like Amazon and Walmart. I know as a seller, when both platforms were rising, I was pretty concerned about pricing wars, but things like this can also cause potential shifts in consumer behavior driven by these platforms.

And they remind us just how important it is to protect your intellectual property and have honest marketing practices. So review your brand protections and advertising claims to protect what you own. And as always diversify, you guys, can you imagine getting stuck in business practices because you're just on one of these platforms? Anyways, we'll continue to monitor the outcomes to understand how these rulings might impact future business practices. So stay tuned.

on future episodes of the Weekly Buzz. Then we have some TikTok shop news from the Mark Tech Cube. Stickler has introduced the first ever live selling analytics platform in the TikTok shop app store, providing live sellers with advanced insights to optimize performance and boost sales. This innovative tool does a host of things like offer real-time analytics, auto-generated reports, and host and messaging analysis, helping sellers understand what drives engagement and conversions during TikTok live streams.

With TikTok shop poised to deliver over $3 billion a month in GMV, aka gross merchandise value in the US during November and December, live selling is projected to grow by 30 to 60% in streams and session lengths. Stickler empowers sellers worldwide with support for every local language and tailored insights, ensuring that they can maximize returns during these critical months.

Early adopters have reported enhanced audience engagement, better ROI, and improved host effectiveness. Keeping this in mind, here is my takeaway. There's a growing power nested in live selling, and as a seller, it's well worth exploring. You can use Stickler to analyze what works in your live streams from host actions to audience behavior and use that to optimize your future sessions.

Going back to Amazon, Amazon ads also just unveiled the dynamic traffic engine. It's in beta and it's a groundbreaking tool designed to optimize programmatic ad buying by sending low demand or high demand signals to supply side platforms, otherwise known as SSPs. Dynamic traffic engine helps SSPs prioritize ad requests that are more likely to generate impressions. This reduces unnecessary bid processing and network costs.

improving efficiency for all the stakeholders in the ad supply chain. In early tests, SSPs saw a 40% reduction in low demand requests and a 7% improvement in fill rates, as well as increased ad spend per million requests.

This tool is already being used by other SSPs, but you guys, since this is meant to streamline the delivery of relevant ads, ensuring that buyers and sellers are connecting more effectively, this is the sort of thing that can help you target audiences with greater precision, boosting your ad campaign ROI by minimizing those inefficiencies in that buying process and the ad buying process. This goes hand in hand with improved campaign relevance as accessing a more targeted pool of impressions leads to the higher quality traffic and

and better campaign results. Hopefully, those of you that are using Amazon ads can experience lower costs and better performance, myself included, ensuring that our marketing dollars are going better and further. We also have Amazon's discounted Prime membership for young adults ages 18 to 24, and higher education students provides all the benefits of a standard Prime membership at half the cost.

For just $7.49 per month or $69 annually, eligible members can enjoy perks like fast free delivery access to Prime Video, exclusive Prime Day deals, and more. Additional benefits include travel discounts through Student Universe offering 10% off flights, Amazon gift cards for hotel bookings, etc. But the discounted membership does specifically target young adults and students who represent a significant percentage

section of online shoppers. So if it makes sense for your products, I would consider optimizing your product offerings for catering to this audience's preferences and needs. Lower cost Prime memberships may encourage those young adults to shop more frequently on Amazon. And I have one last fun one for the road because I'm a Steve Madden shoe lover. That is Amazon announced that the Buy With Prime program is now going to be on stevemadden.com giving US-based Prime members a

Access to their beloved shopping benefits directly on the iconic shoe brands website. Shoppers can now enjoy fast, free delivery, easy returns and a streamlined checkout process when purchasing that signature shoe style, be it the Madrid or Astor collections. Launched in 2022, Buy With Prime enables direct-to-consumer merchants to integrate Amazon's fulfillment network into their own websites.

Participant merchants have seen a 16% increase in shopper conversion rates and improved inventory turnover. The program's expansion to brands like this really illuminate their ability to extend and influence beyond the platform, enabling sellers to tap into Prime Loyal customer base on other sites. This also cross-sells trust, in my opinion, and offers a really seamless shopping experience. So overall summation here would really be that this serves as an example in transforming DTC,

e-commerce by reducing the customer acquisition costs and building long-term shopper loyalty, utilizing other brands. So if you operate a DTC website, consider adopting Buy With Prime to attract new customers and enhance operational efficiency. Really make sure that you're emphasizing the benefits of like fast delivery, hassle-free returns to reassure those customers and drive conversions.

So that does conclude our news piece for this week for new feature alerts. Let me pass the baton to Bradley. All right, next up, let's get into our new features alert. Uh,

Um, all right. So these two new features are, again, I'm going to use, go ahead and use the word game changer. This is something that you have never been able to do in any other tool guys. All right. Uh, it's taking what we had with our historical Amazon or historical Cerebro and taking it to the next level, right? This is available in the diamond plan, uh, and above, um, it was only available in elite for a while. Now it's down to the diamond plan, but basically let's say you're looking at a competitor or even your own listing, um,

But let's just say in this case, I'm looking at a competitor coffin shelf and I'm looking at their BSR history over time. All right. So let me look all time. So like maybe right here, I see that. Wow. Look at this August, September of 2023. Their BSR was sub 100,000. Like they were, they were doing pretty well, but then look at this in November. All of a sudden their BSR was like,

Over 200,000. So in other words, I can see clearly that my competitor lost sales, right? I could look at this the opposite way. Let's say from one month to the next, they actually gained sales. Like what would happen in 2021? And then the next month, you know, they gained sales. But what do you want to know, right? You'd probably want to know like,

Can I tie this drop in sales to them losing traction on a keyword? Like maybe they fell off the search results for a keyword. Maybe they stopped advertising top of search. Maybe their organic rank dropped.

You can do that now with just a few clicks. You cannot do this with any other keyword research tool, guys. All right. Let me just show you how you can do that. Going into Cerebro, you put the ASIN of the product that you are looking at on Amazon. Right. And then you're going to go to this monthly comparison. All right. New button.

So I'm going to go ahead and select here October of 2023. I think November, October, November of 2023. Let me just check. Was that the good sales? Yeah, October was good.

good. And then all of a sudden November became bad, right? So I put October, 2023, November, 2023. Hey, in month one, where was a keyword rank in the top 10 organically? And then the second month I'm going to put zero to zero meaning, Hey, it wasn't even ranking at all. All right. And then as you can see here, a couple of keywords came up, small home decor for shelves and

and shaped wall shelf and you can see that in october it's ranked three and eight and november not right or not me but my competitor dropped off the rank maybe he got d index uh the more likely one is hey where were they ranking the top 10 in october but maybe they were outside of the top 10 from 11 to 306

in rank. All right. So I'm going to go ahead and hit apply. All right. And then as you can see here, I put one to 10, 11 to 306. And wow, look at this 27 keywords. They had a drop. Like, look at this one home decor goth. All right. They were ranked number four in October and then they were ranked 28th. They dropped off the top of the page. Uh, here's another one, witchy home decor, uh,

2,500 search volume in October, November had 1,500 search volume. They were ranked page one position one in October. And then in November drop to page one position 33, meaning that, Hey, we can definitely probably say that they probably got some less sales on this keyword in November. And again, we can tie that.

their drop in sales to certain keywords that they dropped in rank. Here's, here's one. That's a big one. Goth home decor, misspelling, spelling decor, D E C O R E. They went from rank three to rank one 39, right? You think they were getting sales from a keyword that were their rank one 39? Probably not. So this is a really cool way to, to kind of like, you know,

gauge where did your competitor sales come from? The sales increase, where your competitor sales decreases come from, come from a loss in rank, a gain in rank. You can do that by looking at both organic rank or sponsor. Like, Hey, where did they take their foot off the gas? As far as advertising goes, maybe that's why they, you know, stop selling as much. You could play with this tool a lot of different ways, guys.

Speaking of Cerebro, another kind of tool you can use is AI filtering. Let's say I wanted to search all of the keywords that this collagen peptides, is this called? Yeah, collagen essence Korean face mask is ranking for. Well, I would go ahead and pull it into Cerebro. 9,700 keywords. Now we have got this.

AI filter. So for example, I can hit, hey, show me all the Spanish keywords that come up out of these 9,000. So I would write with natural language, the filtering so that, you know, whatever I'm putting here was going to come up. Now, this is not a filter. This is not AI to kind of like ease these filters up here, like search volume and sponsor rank and title density. No, this is just filtering with AI that has to do with the keyword. So watch, I'm going to say show only Spanish keywords and hit apply filter.

And now, as you can see here, look at all these Spanish keywords that came up. Mascaria para puntos negros. Mascaria de colágeno. Mascarias para la cara. All of these Spanish keywords came up within a few instances. What if I want to say, hey, exclude all of the branded keywords. I actually made that one here. So I would say here, brand name removal.

And I would say exclude any keywords containing brand names. Like I don't want that to be in my keyword list, right? And so here's my list of all those keywords that do not have brand names. I could do the opposite. I could say show only keywords

containing brand names. Put that into the AI right here. Hit apply filters. And now let's take a look. All right, look at all these keywords with brand names. Biodance, Wellnature, Mediheal, Tony Moly, Freeman Face Mask, The Face Shop. AI is going to detect which keywords here in these search results have brand names. Now, AI is not 100% always going to get things right. You guys know with any AI, you know, my

hallucinate and do some weird things, but play around with this guys. All right. Let us know what you think. Uh, where doesn't it give you the answers that you were looking for? Make sure to let us know so we can, we can take a look and see if we can train the model, uh, any better, but it's pretty cool. You can now, you know, go ahead and take out brand names, take out Spanish words, see only Spanish words, see only brand names, do all these fun things with, uh, the results of Cerebro.

Thanks, Bradley. How cool. Yeah, I do hope you guys take advantage of all the new features we share with you every week because they do originate from things that you either request or because we genuinely believe that they'll make your life easier. And of course, this week simply wouldn't be complete without you receiving a training tip from us. Since one of our new segments was about upkeeping your listing to be aligned with seasonal or holiday themed words, let me show you just

one way of many ways on how you can filter for gifting keywords and phrases inside of Helium 10. For this, let's navigate over to Magnet. Magnet is a keyword for keyword research tool, meaning you can essentially input in a keyword. As I've done here, I've typed in coffin shelves.

You can type in anything for your niche and it's essentially going to give you additional related phrases that the products showing up for this main keyword may also be showing up for. So here, if we take coffin shelf and click get keywords, this is sort of what we come to and we can then filter for words like gift or gifts. So right here we are taking a look at phrases containing and if I go in and I type in gift or gifts,

And then I click any, if you want, you can select all if you have a series of keywords. And as you can see, we have three come up here. We have coffin gift box. This is a really niche down item, you guys. So I only have three, but you guys might have more. And so you can use this to find keywords that are trending now that might be unique to this time of year for PPC campaigns.

So another example of this could be coffin gifts, gothic mom gifts, gifts for morticians has come up before when we've done the search. And you can use this outside of just using that historical trends feature inside of Cerebro. Hopefully you know what I'm talking about. And if not, you are maybe scouting on Google or TikTok, whatever it is, make sure that you guys take advantage of it.

of this as well. I've run the search before for coffin shelves. We have gifts for morticians come up as a key phrase. So outside of using historical trends inside of Cerebro or scouting for keywords on Google or TikTok, make sure that you guys are taking advantage of this too. With that, that is it for this week. I hope you learned something from this week's weekly buzz and we'll see you next week to see what's buzzing.